Here's a basic (and ever-growing) list of things you can do on
icculus.org. Consider this to be a "terms of use" policy, I guess. If you
don't have an account, but want one, just
email Ryan and tell him why you
should have one, and he'll set you right up.

PLEASE NOTE:

Please note that we turn away 90% of the people who ask for accounts! We
generally only give them out for people that want to host projects here,
and we're a little picky. But then again, getting an account is just a
matter of having a good reason to get one, and there's a lot of random
reasons, so don't be afraid to ask.

However, these are not good reasons:

You want somewhere to use IRC from.

You want to circumvent your school or company's firewall.

You want external file storage.

You want a throwaway email account for spam.

You want to hax0r systems.

You want to run BitTorrent/LimeWire/Gnutella/Kazaa/the P2P software of the week.

You want a personal homepage (and nothing else).

You want to host warez.

You want to host pr0n.

You want to run spam-sending programs.

You want to run bots and web crawlers and such.

I hesistated to explicitly list these things for a long time, because I don't
want people with good ideas to be intimidated that they won't "pass the bar"
and thus never ask for an account, but I get floods of requests for access for
just those above reasons. I want to foster creation, not pay the bandwidth
bill for someone else's abuse. Those that have accounts do have
personal webpages and run IRC clients and store personal files...but they
also contribute to the world around them in various ways.

Basically, use some common sense when deciding if you should ask for an
account. Several i.o services are available for free from less elitist
sites, like Hotmail and
SourceForge.

Things you can do on i.o:

Shell account.
It's a full Unix shell account, complete with your own private home directory,
C/C++ compiler, and the usual programs. We ask that you don't abuse this
privilege by sucking down bandwidth, filling the hard drive, running
SETI@home, or using your account to crack into other systems. There aren't
any resource quotas on icculus.org right now, and I'd like to keep it that
way. Connections to your shell account are done via ssh for security purposes;
there is no telnet support available. Linux and Mac OS X users generally have
a ssh client installed by default and available from a terminal.
I recommend win32 users use
PuTTY for
ssh access.

Two-factor auth.
Shell accounts now optionally offer two-factor authentication via Google
Authenticator. Just run "google-authenticator" from your shell account,
say "yes" when it asks about time-based auth, and point your phone at
the QR code it writes to the terminal. Optionally write down your recovery
codes somewhere. After that, logging in with a private key will work as
normal, but if you log in with a valid password, you'll also be required
to provide the magic number from your phone's Google Authenticator app.

File transfer.
There is also no FTP daemon running. For personal files, use Secure Copy
(scp). If there's something you need to make publically downloadable, put it
in your webspace (see below). Linux and Mac OS X users get scp packaged with
their ssh client, and Mac users might find
Fugu to be a decent GUI
version. For Windows users,
WinSCP is an excellent option, and
PuTTY has a
command line tool.

Finger.
There is a (non-crackable :) ) finger daemon running at icculus.org. It looks
for the file /fingerspace/username as the contents of your
"planfile". By default, we symlink $HOME/.plan to this for convenience.
The daemon will not reveal too much information on its own, such as when
you last checked your email, or a list of users on the system, nor will
it forward finger requests to other sites. If you absolutely don't want ANY
information revealed via finger, just leave the planfile empty, and the
finger daemon will respond exactly as it does when it can't locate a user
in the first place. There is also a web interface to our finger daemon.
For an example:
http://icculus.org/cgi-bin/finger/finger.pl?user=icculus
.
IcculusFinger, which handles finger requests, is a custom piece of
software that web-enables finger access. Part of that system is a simple
(and optional) markup language, that allows you to do some basic text
formatting (bold, center, images, etc). Over the web, these tags become
HTML. On regular finger requests, IcculusFinger formats these tags for a
plain text output to the best of its ability. See
The IcculusFinger project
page for all the gritty details.

Email.
Every account at icculus.org has email. You can receive mail to
yourloginname@icculus.org, and
yourloginname@any-other-virtual-domains-we-have-in-the-future.
All the domains are interchangeable, and will end up in the same mailbox. The
mail system is qmail, and can be
configured to deliver/forward your mail in several ways. Please read the
"dot-qmail" manpage for details. On site, Pine and Mutt are available for
reading mail (others may be installed globally by request, but you can feel
free to build Elm or whatever in your home directory if you like, too), and,
with a little effort, you can get your mail from offsite via an encrypted
IMAP4/SSL connection or our webmail system. Please read
our email HOWTO for all
the gritty details. All email is virus scanned (and blocked if positive)
before it reaches your inbox, and you can optionally enable various degrees
of spam blocking.

Mailing lists.Mailman is installed, and you can use
it to maintain your own mailing lists. All projects have a mailing list assigned to them upon request.

Jabber.
We run our own XMPP ("Jabber") server, so you can use this for IM
conversations. At a minimum, you can chat with Google Talk people without
having a Google account, but the entire Jabber network is available to you,
if you like.

Subversion. Icculus.org is primarily meant to be an
incubator for open source projects, and to that end, we offer public,
anonymous Subversion ("svn")
access. We no longer offer CVS accounts, and are in the process of migrating
the existing ones to Subversion repositories.
There are good svn applications for Windows, MacOS, and Unix, including GUI
and shell-integrations in some cases.

Please be aware that we will not add dozens of shell accounts for each
developer that might want a fossil repository. Each account is considered
independently, so plan accordingly.

Webspace.
Every user on icculus.org has a personal webspace. It can be accessed by
http://icculus.org/~yourusername/ ... to add files to this space,
put them in /webspace/homepages/yourusername/ ...Note that
"icculus.org" can be replaced with any of our virtual domains in that URL.
Every project has webspace, too: http://icculus.org/projectname/
and /webspace/projects/myprojectname/, respectively. The project
webspace is linked from the icculus.org front page, once there's something
substantial to see there. You are not to run ANY banner
ads or popup (or popunder) advertisements on icculus.org webpages. Period.
Icculus.org's webserver also has Secure Socket Layer (SSL) support, so if you
prefer to view webpages with encryption, connect to
https://icculus.org/ instead of
http://icculus.org/ ...

PHP.
For dynamic web content, PHP5 is available
for use in your personal and project webspace. We don't offer cgi-bin access
without a really good reason, but PHP covers anything you'd practically need
to do.

Other stuff. Please read
our donation page ...
We don't charge a dime for use of icculus.org, and we are very firmly against
banner ads, so any sort of support you can lend is greatly appreciated.
Other than that, if there's a service that you need and don't have,
don't hesistate to ask, and we'll
see what we can work out.